Monday, March 12, 2007

Not sure if you've been following the Python Reloaded thread on edu-sig, but there's some concern for our snake if it doesn't sprout the edit/continue hooks our competitors sport. Of course I've already made mention of Microsoft's Python, relying on community code, but I'm not close to that action. Maybe PyPy is where we need to look.

I've got two in the hole with the Synergetics storyboards,the first focusing on my career as a community activist, with lots of concessions to qyoob-heads. My second is going to bother certain factions, given we're capitalizing on school infrastructure originally built to impress future factory laborers. Not that we don't still have or want factories by the way -- and don't forget about "factory functions", a feature in our Algebra One.

I've gotten a lot of feedback over the Klingon business,and thank the other Conway (Republic of Perl's) for helping to keep that ball rolling, with that detailed lecture on its grammar at OSCON that time, mixed in with everything else under the sun (except some things). The next year it was Lara Croft (geeks love Lara).

By "Klingon business" I mean that it's quasi in Unicode, even if unofficially. As every gnu math teacher knows, we tie the powers-of-two proliferation of addessable cells with ASCII (Latin-1)and then Unicode, as mappings of human glyphs. Invented languages, such as Klingon, or Elven in Tolkien, have ways of piggy-backing on all this infrastructure, a feature meaningful to children's books writers among others.